One of the challenges of not being an indie studio is the inflexibility of a big studio. Indie studios are the ones that can more easily adapt to customer feedback and make changes to their products. The big ones are selling a product and making a lot of money, no matter how crappy the game actually is. Ultimately, it’s the publisher who holds the reins.
Can you imagine Bethesda, or EA, collecting customer feedback in the way Funcom does, and reacting to even some of it in the manner we’ve seen Funcom doing? Nah. It’s the labor of love games that are getting any actual love. The rest of the industry are selling core game features as DLCs.
And, as I said, the feedback from this community is so inconsistent that it’s a Herculean effort to filter the useful out of the white noise. There’s no way to please everyone all the time, but they’re trying to please everyone some of the time, which means they’re also upsetting a lot of people all of the time, because every update is going in the wrong direction in someone’s opinion.
It might be better if they just focused on one vision, one direction, and keep going that way. It would alienate some players, certainly, but it would give the rest a more consistent idea of where the game is going.
Yeah. But if the employer demands the mechanic to work with their right arm tied behind their back, or the doctor to wear a blindfold, their performance will be less than optimal.
It’s pretty clear that Funcom game developers don’t get to do what they want, or use as much time as they need to do the tasks the higher-ups demand. We don’t really get a good view on how skilled professionals the developers are if they suffer from crappy management.
I used to work as a translator. I quit because the deadlines for each project were so tight that I could not produce the quality I would’ve been proud of, and I didn’t want to release crap. There was nothing I could do to affect the dealines or the working conditions. I’m afraid there are many people in that position right now - they either need to keep producing crap they can’t be proud of, or try to find employment elsewhere, and the latter choice isn’t an easy one.